All women's dresses, in every age and country, are merely variations on the eternal struggle between the admitted desire to dress and the unadmitted desire to undress.

Lin Yutang’s epigram treats fashion as a perpetual negotiation between social display and erotic suggestion. On the surface it is a witty generalization about women’s clothing across cultures and eras; underneath it frames dress as a cultural technology that both conceals and reveals, satisfying norms of modesty while hinting at the body those norms forbid. The “admitted” desire to dress points to respectability, identity, and ornament; the “unadmitted” desire to undress points to sensuality and the pleasure of transgression. The line’s humor depends on this tension, though it also reflects the gendered assumptions of its time by reducing women’s fashion primarily to sexual signaling.